Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Rowland The Tar Baby

Henry David Thoreau
used to say that most ways of making money lead downward. The way downward will
be swift for John Rowland, former governor of Connecticut and, very likely,
former radio talk show host.

Lisa Wilson Foley
and her husband Brian Foley pleaded guilty Monday in U.S. District Court to
having paid Mr. Rowland for “secret political assistance” by means of a sham
contract, a violation of campaign finance law.

Brian Foley fessed
up after federal authorities threatened to prosecute his wife. The Foleys admitted culpability in court. Lisa
Wilson-Foley said, "I did not report money that my husband paid to John
Rowland while he was working on my campaign," and her husband said, “I
knowingly and intentionally conspired with co-conspirator one, who was John
Rowland." Prosecutors negotiated with the Foleys a plea agreement under
the terms of which the Foleys pled guilty to misdemeanor charges that carry a
maximum penalty of a year in prison.

Having secured the
co-operation of the Foleys, prosecutors will now turn their attention towards
Mr. Rowland, who really ought to have readThe Prince of Providence, a book that
details the life and times of former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci, who was, like Mr.
Rowland, also a radio talk show host
following his release from prison on corruption charges. Mr. Cianci, who
carried with him into his radio talk show most of his vices and few of his
virtues, was twice jailed, twice won the mayoralty of Providence, and twice
sought refuge in radio talk show land.

It was Mr. Rowland,
Connecticut’s political tar baby, who first approached the Foleys with a
proposition. He would help Lisa Wilson Foley win her contest for a U.S. House
seat in the 5th Congressional District. There was, however, a
proviso: Any assistance from radio talk show host Rowland must be masked – and renumerated. It was the renumeration,
not the assistance, that caught Mr. Rowland’s foot in the prosecutorial snare.

Connecticut’s
political commentators have sometimes passed from political commentating to
politics without much unfavorable notice. Charlie Morse, perhaps the longest serving political commentator at the Hartford Courant, joined the Lowell Weicker gubernatorial
campaign after having written scores of columns favorable to Mr. Weicker, but Mr.
Morse never accepted payment from Mr. Weicker for having written the columns.
That’s a journalistic no-no.

However, he did
continue writing about Mr. Weicker for the Courant after having accepted a job
in the Weicker administration, which is also a no-no and amounts to
journalistic renumeration.

These speed bumps
were no bar to Mr. Rowland, who had in the past spent some time in prison after
having pled guilty to a charge of “depriving the public of honest service” when
he was governor of Connecticut.

Following Mr.
Rowland’s conviction, which itself followed an aborted impeachment, Hugh Keefe, who had defended many politicians caught in the coils of corruption, noted that
Mr. Rowland had compromised his reputation for nickels and dimes: “…when you look closely at what he did, it
was nickels and dimes. And I've known a lot of politicians, who I can talk
about now because they're dead, and what was going on in the Rowland
administration is really not out of line with what I know was going on in the
'50s, '60s and ‘70s.”

And the tar baby
soiled everyone he touched. Former
Connecticut Party Chairman Chris Healy was a senior advisor to the Lisa-Wilson
Foley campaign. Mr. Healy, “Political Advisor 1” in prosecution documents,
authored a public statement in 2012 “denying Rowland was being paid by the
Wilson-Foley campaign and saying Rowland had a paid business relationship with
Foley's nursing home chain,” according to Hartford Courant story.

Queried by a courant
reporter on his false statement, Mr. Healy “said that his statement only
repeated what the Foleys and Rowland told him, and that he didn't know it was
false. In light of Monday's guilty pleas, he said, the Foleys ‘did not tell me
the truth, obviously,’ and ‘I guess’ Rowland didn't either.”

Mr. Rowland may have
lied to his employer as well. Early last month, retired news director for WFSB-TV3
in Hartford Dick Ahles wrote in an op-ed piece in the Journal Inquirer,
“Rowland works for a respected news organization, one of the few left on the
radio. If a newspaper columnist, paid to express his opinion on politics and
politicians, was employed by a candidate or her husband or even working
voluntarily for a candidate without telling his readers, he’d be fired or at
least have his column taken away until the matter was settled.

2 comments:

peter brush
said...

Not that we're just discovering it now, but it's clear that John Rowland is a dope.

But, the crime he may have committed, not reporting his paid affiliation with a particular political campaign, is artificial, if not entirely phony. Who did he injure? It's not as if he is a public officer who while owing a fiduciary duty deliberately deceived the citizenry about health insurance, deliberately set about destroying the market for same in order to set the stage for a complete government takeover (that is as yet politically unpopular). It's not as if he took taxpayer money, and gave it to a hedge fund or a sports media company. It's not as if he took money from public sector employees , and then negotiated a contract with them.----Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said Tuesday.

"He was not serving the public office, but he had the interesting position of trying to impact and influence political discourse on an afternoon radio show. That somebody would violate that trust as well is disturbing," Malloy said in response to reporters' questions.

John Rowland should be a poster boy for every RINO in the country, and sadly, that's most Republicans, at least for the mment. He threw away a promising future for a hot tub and a few 2X4s. He was on the wrong side of the Gun Debatein 2012 and 2013 and used his position on the air to stack the deck on that issue when it was being talked about on his show. He bears every clinical description of being a pathological liar and his questionable past regarding his own misogyny and domestic violence is not the mark of an honorable man. Everyone - most, anyway, deserve a second chance. Rowland proved he couldn't handle that, either. On the legal charges, innocent until proven guilty. On the moral charges, guilty as sin.